Reviews
Graham Fuller
In the opening scene of Lav Diaz’s Norte, the End of History, the cash-strapped Fabian (Sid Lucero), a law school’s star student until he dropped out, sits in a trendy café pontificating to his friends about the absence of truth and meaning in the Philippines of the 21st century. A nascent absolutist vigilante who extols such 1890s liberationist revolutionaries as José Rizal and Andrés Bonifacio – “they did what they needed to do, and then they died" – Fabian also regrets that Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship of 1965-1986 failed because he softened, culminating in today’s corrupt Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When the first, and shattering, series of Utopia ended 18 months ago there were alarming suggestions that its ratings weren't good enough to justify a second, even though there was plenty of potential for one. On the other hand if there were to be a series two, could it ever be good enough?Admittedly watching one episode of six isn't enough to form a conclusive verdict, but it is with joy (as well as terror, unease and anxiety) that I can report that so far, series two is well on track to compete with the original. Writer Dennis Kelly clearly has a mind like a black labyrinth and a sadistic Read more ...
Jann Parry
This is the heart-wrenching time of year when dance school students give their graduation performances and professional dancers bow out at the end of their careers. How poignant to watch Paris Opéra Ballet étoile Nicolas Le Riche, alone on the vast Palais Garnier stage, bidding farewell to his fans at 42, and then to witness Royal Ballet School youngsters making their debuts en masse at the Royal Opera House.For many RBS students, the annual matinée may be their only experience of performing on the Covent Garden stage. Of this year’s 26 graduates, just three have been accepted into the Royal Read more ...
David Nice
Bakst’s harem drapes and Roerich’s smoking, steaming Polovtsian camp may not have had the most lavish of recreations. But the rest of this homage to Diaghilev shone with an exuberance and even a precision one would not have thought possible from previous seasons of what had once seemed like Andris Liepa’s Ballets Russes vanity project. Mariinsky star of long standing Yulia Makhalina sprinkled gala stardust, the corps of the revelatory Natalia Sats Children’s Theatre re-enacted Fokine’s routines with theatrical flair and that energy levels were so high throughout had everything to do with the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Buxton has gone Bohemian, digging into Dvořák’s treasure trove and celebrating Gluck’s tercentenary. The choice of Dvořák’s The Jacobin fits the Buxton Festival tradition of rooting out neglected works, since this has been unjustly overlooked since the first performance in 1889. It’s an irony that this makes Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice an unexpected choice, being ever-popular since 1762. However, artistic director Stephen Barlow has linked them for the festival’s two new home-grown productions for this, the 36th festival.Director Stephen Unwin gives us a moderately updated version of The Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chelsea Handler may be an unknown name for many in Britain - although some will know her from her spat with Piers Morgan on his now-cancelled US chat show - but there were plenty of fans at the London Palladium to watch the actress, comic and chat show host making her UK stand-up debut, with a one-off show based on her travelogue of a trip to Africa with some friends, Uganda Be Kidding Me.In typical American stand-up style, the show was only an hour long, and she didn't deviate from the script to riff on local subjects or engage with the audience. When a fan called out for “the kayak Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
What makes an exciting “genuine” photographer is fairly simple: what do you see in the photographs? Do they compel you to look at them? How evocative are the images? How interesting are the compositions? These are among the criteria which separate the merely good from the truly great – and who would have expected that there are truly great photographers yet undiscovered, or even some that didn’t want to be discovered? This is the backstory of Finding Vivian Maier, an exceptional and exceptionally compelling documentary co-directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel.It was Maloof’s own Read more ...
Naima Khan
As far as essential female experiences go, Esther Mills hasn't had many. A 35-year-old virgin living in New York City in 1905, she is destined to go down in history as an "unidentified negro seamstress", to cite the caption on the projected image of her that opens Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel in a very fine Off West End staging from the director Laurence Boswell that was first seen in Bath. Now at north London's Park Theatre, this 2003 play from the multi award-winning American dramatist who went on to pen Fabulation (2004) and the Pulitzer prize-winning Ruined (2008) hones this author's Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s 70 years since Mondrian died in New York, leaving unfinished his last painting, Victory Boogie-Woogie, an ebullient title quite at odds with the buttoned-up asceticism we normally associate with this artist. The Courtauld Gallery showed a small survey two years ago, which paired his flat grid compositions with the paintings and white reliefs of Ben Nicholson, focusing only on his two years in London (1938 to 1940). Though it proved surprisingly illuminating, in its precise, compare-and-contrast way, any exhibition promising a little more depth must be welcome. Now we have two, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It's a woman’s world at Park Theatre, where an all-female company tackles three American shorts that place the private feminine experience under a microscope. Jack Thorpe Baker’s casting yields mixed results, emphasising the shrewd analysis of gendered thought in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and Philip Dawkins’s Cast of Characters (both half an hour), though Brooke Allen’s 50-minute study of grief, The Deer, already suffers from character opacity. The Deer is markedly less incisive, providing the evening with a somewhat muted conclusion.Cast of Characters offers dizzying formal experimentation, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lewis: L'AmourImagine a very subdued Antony Hegarty whispering over the spookiest moments of Angelo Badalamenti’s music for Twin Peaks. Or conjure up a marriage of Arthur Russell’s shimmering World of Echo and John Martyn at his most intimate, but shorn of all but the most necessary instrumentation. To say that L’Amour, the only album by Lewis, is arresting underplays it. This is one of the most direct and affecting series of songs ever captured in a studio. Yet until a few years ago it was unknown and, even then, only available as a dodgy download with added colour from the scratches Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
When the lights go up on Jack Shepherd’s In Lambeth, you could be forgiven for assuming you were looking at a biblical scene. A man and a woman sit naked in the branches of a tree, a tableau straight out of Eden, not south London. She has a book in her lap; he’s picking out a tune on a tin whistle. All is serene.Except this isn’t Eden, and they are not Adam and Eve. This is London in the late eighteenth century, and William and Catherine Blake are reading Milton’s Paradise Lost while sitting in a tree in their Lambeth garden. William is talking to the angel who taught him the tune he is Read more ...